Selling the ground: transforming stone from commons to commodity in Alpine Italy

Abstract Even stones can be caught in the alchemical transformation of all that exists into money, to paraphrase a famous Marxian passage. Even stones that were considered part of mountain commons which selling on the market was explicitly prohibited during pre-modern times. To understand how such stones became the basis of a once florid extractive industry in the Eastern Italian Alps, where I conducted fieldwork, means analysing the complex social and historical dynamics of generation of an extractive resource in the transition to the Industrial Epoch. This article explores how resource extraction developed and evolved in the locality under study. I examine, through structural and conjunctural time and across local, regional, and global scales, how nature was appropriated for extraction, the social frameworks that supported this practise, and the processes of valorisation and devaluation of the resource. I show how pre-modern structural dynamics adapted to new extractive logics, laying the foundations for the property structures and modern conceptions of community, value, and resource use I found on the ground. During the 20th century, the development of the industry involved critical economic junctures. These changes affected wage structures, contributed to the socio-economic fabric of the community, and shaped the relationship of locals to the resource. Marxian value theory allows to untangle the processes of the creation of the extractive resource. It helps the analysis not only of the resource valorisation’s history but also of its devaluation and of the contemporary social conceptions developing out of the current industrial crisis affecting the area.